Campaign as Epitaph

By Gilbert Cruz

It's impossible not to be saddened by Thurston Clarke's look at Robert F. Kennedy's 82-day quest for the White House. Even if THE LAST CAMPAIGN (Henry Holt; 321 pages) did not begin with a moving account of Kennedy's funeral train (which it does), the story's end is already well known.

Yet that sense of inevitability also makes it an exhilarating read, for rarely since has a politician of such stature embarked on a campaign so genuinely wedded to the concepts of sacrifice and moral empathy. Clarke's day-to-day account of the period from March 1968, when Kennedy announced his run, to June 5, when he was assassinated, superbly documents R.F.K.'s antiwar, antipoverty, anticomplacency platform.

Kennedy seemed to delight in telling audiences the opposite of what they wanted to hear. Amid the era's taut racial tensions, he spent more time asking white audiences to step into the shoes of aggrieved blacks than he did pandering to their desire for law and order. In Clarke's passionate retelling, Kennedy seemed to know what lay ahead; he ran his race with such disdain for safe politics, it was "as if this campaign might have to serve as legacy, and epitaph."